A diversity of life thrives in the littoral zone- a thin strip of coastline between high and low watermarks. As the operating metaphor for our online journal, it refers to that part of Key West routinely overrun by the tide of literature, and to the rich life of letters in this island city.

Tweet Us A Story based on this photograph by Curt Richter and a first line by Geoff Dyer.

The first session of the Key West Literary Seminar’s “Writers on Writers” has concluded, and now we’re preparing for the second session, January 17-20, 2013. In the meantime, we’ve partnered with South Florida’s NPR station WLRN for a creative, interactive project on Twitter, and we hope you’ll join us. Following their success with “Tweet Us A Story” and the Miami International Book Fair with Junot Diaz, we thought we’d get in on the fun.

Join us on Twitter this evening at 5:00 p.m. as author Geoff Dyer tweets us the first line of a story inspired by the above photograph by Curt Richter. With the seminar’s focus on biography, the idea is that we will create an invented biography inspired by the subject of the photograph.

Paul Hendrickson read Sunday morning from the prologue of his book Hemingway’s Boat. The biography focuses on a 27-year period of the author’s life from April 1934 when he bought Pilar from a Brooklyn shipyard until the end in July 1961 when he took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho.

A Washington Post journalist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hendrickson explained the approach to his book as “averted vision,” a sailor’s term whereby looking at a subject off to the side—and not head on—enables one to see the subject more clearly. Pilar was significant, Hendrickson notes, because she endured three marriages, and was perhaps the thing Hemingway loved most as he spent his days in Key West, Bimini, and Cuba sport-fishing on the Gulf Stream in search of marlin, sailfish, and tuna.(more…)

Brenda Wineapple reminded us that Emily Dickinson was a woman “eminently capable of saying no”; she considered it a radical act. “No is the wildest word in the language.” So what about when she didn’t say no?

Dickinson chose Thomas Wentworth Higginson “from an ample nation” to be her reader, and she initiated the relationship with a letter, the seductive description of which begins Wineapple’s book White Heat. Dickinson wanted him to say if her poems were “alive.” The language and format of the letter were as original as the poems enclosed, but most remarkable, in Wineapple’s description, is the fact that Dickinson enclosed her name on a tiny card in its own tiny envelope, separated from both the poems and the letter. In the context of our seminar, the eccentric gesture becomes a potent symbolic representation of the complex relationship between the author, the person, and the work.(more…)

Reading Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head is one way to get under the influence of Graham Greene. Another is by sampling the cocktails at this year’s seminar.

Sean Hoard (bartender, Teardrop Lounge, Portland Oregon) and Jason Rowan (mixologist, Men’s Journal contributor) read deep into Greene’s work for inspiration, “which was a fun break from the cocktail books and food magazines I usually read,” said Hoard. The two then devised liquid tributes to characters, moments, and “vibes” drawn from the literature.

Last Thursday night’s menu, for example, offered the Aunt Augusta, inspired by Travels With My Aunt. A blend of local calamondin marmalade, Beefeater 24 gin, lemon juice, honey, and Champagne, the concoction embodied the free-spirited, worldly, classy character in the novel. It even resembled her: an orange-y redhead.(more…)

James Atlas at the 2013 Key West Literary Seminar. Photo by Nick Doll.

For those thinking that life as a literary biographer is a cakewalk, James Atlas is here to school you.

In his delightfully humorous address, “The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale,” at the seminar on Saturday January 12, Atlas recounted the sometimes difficult, often bumbling and always confusing relationship between a biographer and his subject.(more…)

Judith Thurman began her career as a poet and translator of poets including the seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Photo by Nick Doll.

On Saturday morning, Judith Thurman gave a talk entitled “Translating a Life: Who are you? Who am I?” As Thurman explained, the act of translation is complicated, whether it be the translation of a text from one language to another, or the translation of life events into a biography. To get at that complexity, Thurman used a series of metaphors that, by the end of the talk, had created a sort of mosaic, with each little chip offering a glimpse into the process of translation.

The translator is an artisan, she said, referring to Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” and reminding us that the translated text could be a pot that still bears the potter’s fingerprints. She also reminded us of the religious connotations of the term “translation,” which refer to the movement of sacred objects, such as the remains of saints, from one location to another, possibly heavenly, locale.(more…)

From the moment Colm Tóibín took the stage yesterday to discuss Henry James, the subject of his 2004 historical novel The Master, the crowd that filled the San Carlos Institute auditorium was electrified.

In a voice inflected by Enniscorthy in Ireland’s County Wexford, where he was born and raised, with the fast pace of the international cities where he has lived, Tóibín launched his talk by rattling off a litany of books by and about the James family that preceded the publication of his: among them, Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry, Jean Strouse’s biography of Henry’s sister Alice, along with F. O. Matthiessen’s collective biography of the peripatetic clan of philosophers and writers. “What the world needs now more than anything is a novel about Henry James,” he said dryly, recalling his original conception of the book and evoking one of the many belly laughs that filled the room during his talk.(more…)

“I once wrote about Graham Greene, and he said ‘You managed to get everything wrong. This is a horror.'”—Michael Mewshaw, author of Do I Owe You Something?, a memoir of his encounters with writers including Greene, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, and William Styron.

Mark Doty was joined by Jay Parini and Billy Collins for the annual John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Reading.

The first full day of the 31st annual Key West Literary Seminar ended Friday night with The John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Reading by Jay Parini, Mark Doty, and Billy Collins. True to this year’s theme of “Writers on Writers,” Parini began the evening with several poems inspired by his encounters with other writers, one of the earliest being Jorge Luis Borges. As a young poet studying in Scotland, Parini was charged with entertaining the aging, nearly-blind Argentine for a couple of days. Parini’s poem told of how, as the two walked through a rookery in the countryside, Borges heard the crows overhead and, his expression shifting and becoming distant, he essentially became the cawing birds.(more…)

Graham Greene plagues Pico Iyer. He’s felt it for most of his life. Where Iyer goes, Greene has been. What happens to Iyer happened to The End of the Affair author decades earlier. Greene is as much a part of Iyer’s life as his own work and family. The celebrated travel writer has posited that he doesn’t exist at all, that he is simply one of Greene’s creations.(more…)

A delightful series of cocktails have been gracing the seminar this week that were inspired by the travels and writings of Graham Greene. Jason Rowan, of Brooklyn Hemispherical Bitters and Embury Cocktails, as well as Sean Hoard, of Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon, have been life-long fans of Greene and spent the year re-reading his opus to find the best descriptions of tipples. They then took that inspiration and have been crafting cocktails for the literary minded attendees for the past couple of days, with more Greene libations to come.

Reception at The Oldest House in Key West on Duval Street for the KWLS – Writers on Writers.

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Littoral is our year-round online voice. Check in often for news about the upcoming Seminar, exclusive interviews, pictures from past events, new additions to our Audio Archives, essays, and all manner of dispatch from Key West's rich life of letters. Littoral is created by Arlo Haskell; send email to arlo[at]kwls[dot]org

Each January, the Seminar explores a different literary theme through lectures, panel presentations, readings, informal gatherings, and discussions. In January 2015 we celebrate our 33rd year with How the Light Gets In: Literature of the Spirit.